


only gonna if you let me

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: DancerLoki, Everyone Needs A Hug, Healing, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sibling Bonding, Sibling Incest, Tags Are Hard, They are all broken and healing, idk man, relationships too, things are implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 19:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18430985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Time broke and no one knows how long it was between then and now. The tick marks on the caves don’t match and the sun's a little too dim to be midwinter, but what is time anyway.Monster clicks his teeth and you, and you push a bowl of soggy grains at him.Time is hunger, physical and otherwise, and it passes only when fed.





	only gonna if you let me

You look at him, in his too-small bed, and he is so much bigger that the child you remember. You look at him, with his dark braid, and his pale-bruise skin, and the scars you weren’t there for, and you think  _ ‘who is this stranger?’ _

Everyone thinks that now. 

Now that the world has ended. But your world ended before the dust settled. It ended with a silent exhale, blue-green fade to purple. Your world ended with a pop in space and a promise of a new sun shining.

You didn’t get him back. Not really. You got… you’re not even sure. You stole something, a lot of somethings. Earth and Magic and Science and Alien, all little trinkets you borrowed with no intentions of returning. 

You built this creature resting in his bed. You  built him when no one else could, no one else would. 

They do not suspect this monster of being anything less than… well, not human. But not monster either. 

After all, you’re nothing more than muscles to them. 

Stranger shifts in his sleep, ankle catching in the sheets and he grunt, too low in his throat. 

You shiver and it should be fear or disgust. But you’ve always shivered the wrong way around him. 

—

Time broke when the world cracked in half. Science says it didn’t. That the earth still moves about the sun and the moon still spins lazily. 

Magic says it just restarted. The world does that, floods and ice and fire and dust; hits the button and zeros out. 

Alien says time is a human concept which is ridiculous when their calendars have just as many pages. 

Time you think, did break, inexplicably but obviously. Survivors with too many more wrinkles than the Returners. Brothers who towered over their sisters, now struggling to keep up on legs that should be longer. 

Time broke and no one knows how long it was between then and now. The tick marks on the caves don’t match and the sun's a little too dim to be midwinter, but what is time anyway. 

Monster clicks his teeth at you, and you push a bowl of soggy grains at him. 

Time is hunger, physical and otherwise, and it passes only when fed.

—

Monster dances. 

You don’t think it’s new. Not… he’s always been graceful. Moving liquid and slow, bowing sudden and lethal. 

But he dances now, trained by Spiders and Widows, high on his toes, too-sharp knees cutting the air, too-brittle fingers spinning him ‘round.

He’s beautiful, dangerous. Every bend poised to strike, every turn curved with poison.  

He danced before, spun in and out of battles, flit between friend and foe. 

He danced under you too, before, the only time ever seemed small caught between your forearms. 

Widow watches him dance with sharp eyes but kind hands and spider bows his back, spreads his legs, and tries to make him laugh. 

But when he moves across the floor, silent bounds and thundering leaps, you can see the stranger proud fear in their eyes.  No warrior ever moved so gracefully and no dancer so precisely.

—

You called him from another place using forbidden words and gum-rot herbs.

Falcons and Captains and Stark men in Iron told you not to, begged you leave him be. 

Selfish of them, to fight to undo the end for their own hearts, but to deny you even a chance. 

Winter looked you in the eyes, head cocked, lips pursed, and said “He won’t be what you remember.”

Neither of you say it, but Winter knows this personally. “He doesn’t need to be. He just needs to come home.”

Winter’s eyes are cold storms, but they have a hidden fire deep inside. “Will it be enough?”

“Where you?” And it’s not cutting or biting. It’s desperate and honest. 

Winter says, “For some.” He doesn’t say for whom, but you know whose bed Winter slinks to when the alcohol stops burning. 

It isn’t Captain’s. 

—

When the world ended and science failed and magic burned all that survived was  _ art. _

Wailing songs lost in the subconscious, Metal-print memorials of all those gone. Homes destroyed and rebuilt from strange materials and stitched together with threads of memory in blues and greys and shimmering yellows. 

People say around rotting fires and told stories. True and untrue and who cares, about heroes and villains and ordinary children doing extraordinary things. 

That’s how you found the boy. Iron’s boy. His first one. The boy with a drawl and an entire universe in his pale eyes, waving his hands as he told everyone how the world would be saved gods and parasites and humans alike. 

You’d heard about this boy before, Tony’s secret prize. He sees you watching him, nods like you share a secret, and smiles at the kids biting his knees. 

He helps you build Monster’s cradle. Tony wouldn’t like it if he knew, but Tony’s busy saving spiders. 

“I met him once,” Harley tells him. “Tony’s spider.”  He smears oil and grease and blood he doesn’t ask about over ruins carved into old fenders and hubcaps. “I’d do the same for him if Tony would let me.”

You say nothing as you burn rancid smelling weeds and grind the ashes into a green-black cape.

Harley says, “It’s the same as what you’re doing.”

It’s not. But you let him help and that’s all he really wants to do. 

—

Monster lines his eyes in mercury and paints his lips with crushed emeralds. He brushes his cheeks with hate and revenge and it shouldn’t be so stunning.

You think,  _ he never should’ve been this stunning, even before the braids and the face paint.  _

But you’ve always liked pretty things and had a soft spot for brothers who could murder you. Would murder you. 

Has tried, even after you defied physics and wrestled with gods to see his chest rise again.

Monster’s fingers are obsidian daggers painted in moon dust and you’ve felt them beneath your ribs enough times to know how his blood taste.

It taste like meat rot and sugar burn. 

But you’ve also seen  _ him _ when monster snarls above you.

You smile, cup his jaw, and whisper “It’s a new sun.”

Those are the days Monster runs from you. He’s gone so long you wonder if he is real, and then he returns, bloodied and bruised and broken, and he lays on a bed too small for him and he looks so different than the boy you remember. 

You lay with him, in the too-small bed and you try to keep your hands to yourself, but his meatrotsugarburn blood is sticky between you and you can’t let him go for risk his chest won’t rise. 

—

Wizard says “Give him back.”

“To whom?”

Wizard looks at you, bored, and shrugs. “To whomever you took him from.”

You don’t. Can’t. Won’t. 

Your father found him, and set him beside you in your cradle. Your mother loved him and tried to make him better. Your city despised him, and tried to watch him burn. Your friends were wary of him, and mostly they ignored him. 

You broke him, rebuilt him, loved him, sacrificed for him. Watched him die, becoming everything you knew he could be. 

And then you stole him from wherever the dead things wail. 

And now a man in a sentient cape wants you to give him back. 

“No.”

“He’ll bleed you dry,” Wizard says. The needle prick is sharp and the thread pull tight. 

“So be it.”

—

Back before foreign planets and metal men and women with red magic at their fingertips, Monster had another name. 

Before you knew what it was to be king, you held him in your arms. 

Held him against winter grass, swollen eyes and split lips as you tussled for a Kong’s attention. Against stone walls, shivering and lonely when your play took you both too far from the edge. Against sheets in the dead of night when he swallowed your cries as you learned each other’s bodies. 

Now you hold him in your arms to stop him from spinning into nothing. 

“I want to go home,” he screeches. His voice is broken glass and fractured song birds. 

How do you tell him there is no home? How do you remind him you brought him back into a world where nothing is right? Where you only have each other?

You say nothing and he screams himself out, foam staining both your cotton shirts. And when he is quiet, salty, limp, you lay him in your own bed and line yourself against his back the way you once did. 

You close your eyes and he holds your wrist and if you try hard enough, blur the metal beast noises and don’t smell the  spicy honey of his amber breath, you can almost pretend you are just a boy again, sleeping a day away. 

You never remove your hand from his chest though, and that is too new to ever forget.

—

Monster dresses in loose, sheer silks, and hangs off the balcony with his eyes shut. 

“Catch me,” he whispers but you are behind him when he leaps. 

You know the fear that clogs your throat is ridiculous. Neither of you can fly, but the balcony is low and there’s a pool beneath and you hear the splash, wait, then hear the surface break and his whoop. 

He sounds almost…

He sounds like you remember, crowing, “Join me!” 

You do. 

A single, bounding dive over the edge. You land, almost too close to him, and he sputters as the wave hits his eyes. But he smiles at you, blank running, swirling with the red on his cheeks. 

His lips are still crushed emeralds and the slice your lips when you kiss him, but his hands are soft and warm when they settle on your hips. 

—

Wizards says, “Give him back” and Iron says, “Just kill him” and Captain says, “You never should’ve brought him back anyway.”

But Widow and Spider say, “Watch him.”  And so the crowds study him on wooden beams, draped in sheer silk and painted in rubble and rust. 

He moves like a whisper, like a murder, like a dream the world wants to forget, and people watch enraptured. No one looks away. They could, but they don’t. 

Winter says, “Piece by piece,” and you’re not sure what it means.

Harley saves him though. He brings you a small little trinket you’d though lost in the end and beginning and restart. He gives it to you with somber eyes and a look you recognize as he watches Iron and Spider weave about each other. 

“They’re missing a partner,” you say. “That’s why the dance is off beat.”

His eyes spark with hope but he says, “He’s missing a home. That’s why he runs.”

—

A very long time ago, before humans and aliens and wizards and science and stones and dust, you had a home. 

A beautiful planet with water and edges and kings and queens and a magic of a sort, all your own. 

You had a family, a sister, and then you were given a brother. 

You loved him, even before the love grew up, and you wanted to protect him from those who called him monster.

He hurt you, but then he kissed it better. You pressed him to a bed, fucked the breath from him, and then kissed his chest back to rising. 

There was a sun, high and bright and warm that you basked in, and a beach you hid on. And there he found a tiny little broken glass, green as his eyes and run through with lightning, when he danced across the water and it cut his toes. 

You kept the thing, stupid as it was, tucked inside a pocket close to your heart, always.

And then he died and the dust choked you and you dropped it in the restart and everything was broken. 

Now, a lonely Tinker hands you the fragment and there’s a whole story in trembling fingers you choose to forget. Now Monster dances shrouded in glass and laced in poison and the New World feels just like the old in their hate. 

You made this new body of metal and dirt and broken stone and rotten wood and asked it’s heart to best and it’s lungs to breath but you had no home for it, you thought. 

You can’t fix the body; wouldn’t if you could because despite the scars and the sharp edges he  _ looks  _ so much like you remember and he moves as well as he wishes. You can’t fix the mind; but that is how all kinds are these days. 

And you cannot grow a planet destroyed despite your efforts. 

But you can carve a bed big enough for two from Woods that have grown from the dust. You can whisper his name into his braid as you wipe the stain from his cheeks and the gems from lips and the black from his eyes. You can  _ breath _ home into his chest as he rocks beneath you.

And you can build a window from lightning struck glass that shields him from a foreign sun, washes him in green, and almost feels like home.

  
  
  



End file.
